The Informant

33

SCHAEFFER'S FLIGHT INTO Baltimore was six hours of sleep. He dreamed that, according to some new set of government rules that made sense in his dream, if he agreed to die voluntarily, he would be permitted to be alive again at a later, prearranged time. The problem was that to his dream self the offer sounded like a con. He was tempted to try it because if what the government said was true, it was the only way he could ever hope to see Meg again. He was trying to construct some test of the government's sincerity when the plane descended a few hundred feet and the change in pressure woke him.

He looked out the window at the grid of lights, the yellow street lamps and blue-white headlights stretching off into the distance and then stopping at the bright edge before the black ocean. The plane swung slowly around to face the west wind and then began its approach.

It occurred to him that he had passed into a new phase of his life now. A year or two ago, Meg had forced him to go to a church for one of the occasions that the local aristocrats were expected to attend. Since the church was the Church of England, it seemed perfectly safe to him. There were no Anglican Mafiosi. The church was in a village outside Bath, where it was unlikely an American visitor would show up. The priest gave a sermon about the "end times" and what each Christian should expect. The term had stuck with him. These were his end times, the phase after the end of his world had begun but before his death. It was highly unlikely, for instance, that he would be alive in a week and almost impossible that he would last a month.

The bosses of the families had clearly figured out that he was going after all of them, and they had hired specialists to find and kill him. He had seen three specialists. It was possible that there were thirty more ranging the country and waiting for him in likely places, and when the news from Los Angeles spread, there could be sixty or seventy professional killers and hundreds of Mafia soldiers, all hunting for him.

Elizabeth Waring at the Justice Department would soon realize that while she was trying to interest him in being a stool pigeon, he had managed to keep his own schedule of kills going. When she did, her next move would probably be to have the FBI capture or kill him.

He would make the most of his final days. He would still follow the same strategy he'd devised in the beginning of this—kill the shooters and then go up the hierarchy like a ladder, killing the middlemen on the way up until he reached the boss who had sent the shooters.

The advantage he'd had on this visit to America was Elizabeth Waring. They had been using each other. He had given her a chance to solve two or three old gang murders. She had brought his knowledge of the Mafia up-to-date. It was as though without her, he was stuck in the distant past, knowing the enemies only as they'd been twenty years ago. Without him, she had to face bosses who exerted immense power, but did nothing illegal themselves. He had given her the crimes they'd committed before they got powerful.

He would use her again tonight. He couldn't avoid it. The two shooters in Los Angeles had seen him with her at her hotel. There was almost no chance that they hadn't found out which room was hers and what her name was. There were also soldiers from the Castiglione family who had seen her with him in Chicago. Now that he had dropped out of sight again, where were the shooters supposed to go to pick up his trail? They'd go to the place where she was. He was hunting them, so that's where he was going too. If he could make a few kills in Washington to get some of the pros out of the way, it might buy him more time to bag the boss in the next city. If he could get to Boston in the morning, he might be able to hit Providence the same night.

He waited at the baggage claim for his suitcase to come down the chute to the stainless steel carousel. Out of his customary caution he watched for people who looked familiar or who seemed to look past him at something else or watched him in the reflection on the big front windows. He hadn't spotted anyone who worried him before his suitcase slid down onto the carousel. He pulled the suitcase off, swung it to the floor, and extended the handle, then walked off with a purposeful stride. He boarded the shuttle to the car-rental center and settled into a seat facing the terminals.

He looked for the sort of man who might be trouble—a man watching for something to happen, waiting for someone to appear. It was the middle of the night, and the watchers stood out more than they did in the daytime. He saw three as the shuttle moved from one airline's area to another, but he couldn't tell who any of them were. They could have been working for the drug smuggling cartels, the police, federal agencies, foreign governments. It didn't matter, because they weren't interested in him tonight.

The bus left the airport, but he never relaxed his vigilance. After being away from the country for so long, and having returned during a prolonged national security crisis, he knew he no longer had an accurate idea of what sort of surveillance might be focused on people who arrived in the airports around Washington, D.C.

His shuttle reached the lot and he entered the rental center to find it almost deserted. He picked the counter where the night man looked the least exhausted, rented a car with his Charles Ackerman identification and credit card, then drove toward McLean, Virginia. There were a lot of big hotels at Tysons Corners—Westin, Hilton, Marriott, Sheraton—and it was just a couple of miles along Dolley Madison Boulevard to McLean. He pulled into the driveway at the Hilton, left his car with a parking attendant, and said he'd be out in a few minutes.

He went inside and checked in, then took his small suitcase up to his room. He intended to go out tonight to take a quick look around Elizabeth Waring's neighborhood for signs that shooters might have already arrived. He knew that precautions might not be necessary, but he took them anyway. He unpacked his suitcase, took out the external computer drive that held the parts of his gun, and used the small screwdriver he'd packed with it to take off the black housing. He retrieved the parts of his Kel-Tec PF-9 pistol and reassembled them. He loaded the magazine with seven nine-millimeter rounds, inserted it, and put the small, flat gun in his right coat pocket, then shrugged his shoulders to make the coat hang right. He could feel the pistol against his right wrist, where he could reach it in a second. He put his lock-blade knife in his pocket.

He went out to the valet parking attendant to claim his car and drove out to the boulevard toward McLean. He had studied the neighborhood twice before. The first time had been ten years ago, when he had first become aware of Elizabeth Waring. He had rented a house on her block so he could watch her and decide whether or not to kill her. The second time had been a couple of weeks ago, when he had come back to the country and could think of nobody else he still knew who would be intimately familiar with the current hierarchy of the Balacontano family. Before he had gone in, he had studied every house and parked car, every spot where a shadow might be hiding an enemy.

He turned into her neighborhood four blocks from the house and approached it by driving in narrowing circles. The place looked about the same as it had weeks ago, but the hour was much later now. It was after two A.M., and all of the neighborhood windows were dark. The garages were closed and the only cars that were out on the street were the ones that didn't fit in the two-car garages.

He prepared to park and walk a bit, but he noticed something that didn't feel right to him. It was a big SUV with tinted windows. It was parked at the curb on the street behind Elizabeth Waring's house. It was exactly the spot he'd chosen when he'd come to talk to her weeks ago. It had given him a straight, sheltered path from here to there, over a stone wall that was easy to climb, then a stroll along the outer edge of her neighbor's lawn to a low fence into Elizabeth Waring's back yard, and then to the house.

He drove one more block and parked his rental car, then walked back to take a closer look. There had not been a vehicle like this when he'd been here the last time. It was almost certainly the car of a stranger to the neighborhood. He knelt to look at the license plate. It had some deep gouges in its paint, the worst of them around the brand-new set of bolts and nuts that held the plate. The plate was definitely stolen from another vehicle. He looked at the rear door. The lock was held in place by something on the inside, probably tape. It had been hammered out so the door could be opened.

He knew the safest thing to do would be to walk back to his rental car and leave. But he had come to Washington to hunt them, and here they were. He might be able to kill them before they had a chance to kill him. He walked around the SUV trying to see in the tinted windows, looking for anything left inside that might help him.

He supposed they would be set up in an ambush around the outside of Elizabeth Waring's house, like the man who had tried to kill him in Pasadena outside Lazaretti's house. He went to the low fence, looked and listened, then rolled over the fence, squatted in the deep shadow, and listened while he looked for the shape of a person.

There was nobody in this yard, so he began to move. He lingered in shadows and moved slowly, then stopped, staying still, keeping his body low. When he stopped, he kept his body in a crouch that might suggest to the eye "shrub," but never in a shape that suggested "man."

He stretched and compressed time, giving himself several minutes to sense movement, then quickly melting into a deeper darkness when he found it. When he was across the neighbor's yard, he entered Elizabeth's by going over the fence. There were lights on in the back of the house on both floors.

His heart began to beat more strongly, but he held back his eagerness. They weren't waiting for him outside. They were inside, hoping to get him when he came to the door. It was a solid, cautious way to take him. He would knock or ring a bell, they assumed, and they could open the door or shoot him through a window.

They had made a mistake and assumed that he had some kind of personal relationship with Elizabeth Waring. Maybe they had even gone into the house in the middle of the night, believing that they might surprise him in her room. He supposed that when the others had seen him at her hotel, it had given them a distorted idea of their history.

Why they had made the mistake was probably not important. The thing for him to think about was making sure it was a fatal mistake. He had a perfect chance tonight to get these people.

As he made his way to the back wall of the house, he could feel the tension of the moment. The muscles of his legs, arms, back, and stomach tightened, his breathing grew deeper to load his blood with oxygen. It was the old, welcome feeling again, the one he'd first experienced when he was a boy going out to kill with Eddie. On the first few jobs, there had been such fear and elation that it was almost impossible to separate one from the other. His mind had been activated the same way as his body—more blood pumping through his brain so he thought faster and could see things in sharper, brighter relief. It had seemed to him that he could feel the surfaces he looked at long before he touched them.

After those nights, the feeling had returned to him often. Tonight he felt it again, and it made him feel strong and quick and eager. He stood at the side of the sliding door at the back of the living room and looked in. He couldn't see anybody inside. The alarm system keypad was beside the front door, and he could just see it from here. The little lights on the keypad were off. The shooters must have shut it off somehow to get in. He could see into the dining room from here. One of the chairs at the dining room table had been moved out of line. Behind it there was a pool of blood on the light hardwood floor. Had they killed her already? No. There wasn't enough blood for a bullet wound or stabbing, and far too little for anything fatal.

They must have hit her or knocked her to the floor. It was that kind of blood. They hadn't killed her yet. They were probably trying to get her to say where he was going to be next or force her to get him to come here. He hoped she'd had the presence of mind to lie and buy herself some time. If she did, he still might be able to keep her alive if he moved efficiently and made no mistakes.

He reached into his pocket for his knife, opened it, and slid the four-inch blade between the latch and its receptacle to open the latch, then put away the knife and reached into his coat pocket for the small, flat pistol. He'd had the intention of buying a couple of spare magazines for the gun before he tried to use it, but things had happened too quickly. He slid open the door, stepped inside into the living room, and closed it again. He stood with his back against the wall, his body partially concealed by a baby grand piano.

He stood still. The gun was in his right hand, but not aimed. He simply held it pointed to his right because moving his right hand to his left was milliseconds faster than moving it to the right, and his aim would be surer. His left hand touched the wall so he could feel vibrations, and he let his eyes stare into space so anything that entered any part of his vision would be visible to him. He yawned silently so his ears were clear and listened.

Time passed, but he kept no count of the minutes, only tried to hear and feel where people were in the house. He heard and felt the sound of someone heavy walking above him near the back of the house, and a second later, someone else a few feet to the left. Waring's daughter had to be under a hundred pounds and the son was tall, but thin. And kids didn't wear hard-soled shoes like that at this hour. Waring was maybe a hundred and twenty, so it wasn't her either.

It was two men, both upstairs but at least ten or fifteen feet apart, maybe in different rooms at the moment. Were they searching the place? For what? Maybe Waring and her kids weren't even home. The thought made him feel a tentative optimism, but then he heard Elizabeth Waring's voice.

It was a low "Uh, unh. No. Stop." It came from a nearby room. "Stop, please! I already told you what I know!"

Schaeffer was already moving toward her voice. It seemed to be coming from the direction of the little office off the kitchen. He kept the gun ready. There were three of them, two upstairs, probably guarding the kids. This one was downstairs with Waring.

He came to the doorway and took in the scene. The man had light, thinning hair so Schaeffer could see his pink bald spot from there as the man straddled Waring on the floor. He was in the process of tearing Waring's clothes off. He had already gotten her top off and had her bra around her waist and had her black sweatpants down to her knees, so with her pale, sun-deprived skin she looked like a classical statue that had been broken. He could tell from her eyes that she could see him.

As he stepped forward, she showed a burst of energy and tried to immobilize the man's arms by throwing hers around him in a bear hug. Two more steps and Schaeffer was there. He wrenched the man's head around to the left to break his neck, then pushed him off Waring.

Elizabeth was shaking and wide-eyed, with blood running down in streaks from her broken nose and her split lip, but he put his head close to hers and whispered. "Are there two more of them upstairs with your kids?"

She nodded. "Yes. Two." She pulled up her sweatpants, and he turned and picked up her T-shirt from the floor where the man must have tossed it. Then he handed it to her.

He stood, pulled out his pistol, and moved toward the door.

"Wait," she whispered. "I have a gun in the laundry room."

"Where's that?"

"Stay here." He could see she had a hard time getting to her feet. He could tell her arms and legs were tired from wrestling her vastly stronger opponent. But she went to the door, and he noticed that she was barefoot. She must have been hauled out of bed. She was a mess, just running on adrenaline now, and fear for her kids.

She padded into the room again, this time carrying a Glock 17 pistol and a magazine that he could see held sixteen gleaming bullets.

He took the gun and the magazine, inserted the magazine, and pulled the slide back to get a round into the chamber. He whispered, "Tell me the truth. Are you really good with this?"

"I'm okay. I've kept up my qualification for ten or eleven years."

"Do you have any reluctance at all to kill one of those guys up there?"

"No. None," she said.

"Okay." He handed her the gun. "I think they've got your kids in different rooms. They're probably tied or cuffed. If I go in and kill the guy in one room, his buddy will fire on your other kid. So we have to go in both rooms at once. You don't say, 'Stop or I'll shoot' or 'Freeze' or 'Drop it.' You step in and shoot him. And you have to shoot him enough times so he's beyond shooting back." He held her arm to keep her from going. "If you can't do it just like that, tell me."

"I can do it. I want to do it," she said.

He picked a piece of paper and a pencil off the desk and put it on the hardwood floor where they sat. "Draw me the two rooms. Show the door, the back window, the bed, any chairs."

He watched her draw, then nodded. "You take this one—your son's room. I'll get the girl. First we go up as quietly as we can. If anybody comes out of a room, kill him. It won't be your kid."

He put his arm around her shoulders to help her up and they began to walk. At the doorway he whispered, "Quiet, now. Remember, we step in shooting."

"Let's go." She stepped across the big oriental rug in the living room, letting it muffle the footsteps. When she reached the foot of the staircase, she didn't hesitate. She began to climb. Her bare feet made no noise.

He followed and realized that what he was seeing was probably something she had learned when she'd gone up the stairs when her kids were babies. Nobody knew how to go through a house as quietly as the owner. He was tempted to make her stop halfway up to listen for the men, but she was doing so well he waited until they were a step from the top to put his hand on her shoulder. She stopped and looked back at him. He held his hand up to his ear, and they both listened.

There was a steady, low-level hum of talk coming from the boy's room. That seemed good. What worried him was that he wasn't hearing noises from the other room where the girl was. He hoped she wasn't dead.

He looked at Elizabeth and nodded in the direction of the boy's room. She stepped up to the second floor hallway and sidestepped toward the open door. Schaeffer moved toward the other door. He felt a sudden chill. He hadn't taken the time to tell Elizabeth some of the things she needed to know about this situation. She had to step into the middle of the doorway boldly with her eyes wide and the gun out in front of her. There was only the search for the shot and no conceivable reason to hold fire. He reminded himself that she had said she was "qualified" with her pistol, and he had to assume that federal officers were given situational training. If not, then it was too late.

He held her on the edge of his field of vision as he stepped closer to the girl's room. When he was beside the girl's room, he leaned forward just far enough to see that the door was open. He turned to meet Elizabeth's eyes.

She stood with her left shoulder touching the woodwork around the doorway, holding the gun up with both hands and her finger on the trigger. But her eyes were closed. What the f*ck was she doing? She opened her eyes and they met his. He could tell that she'd been praying. He swallowed his irritation. He nodded to her and saw her begin her pivot into the doorway.

He launched himself into the middle of the other doorway, staying low, his right arm extended. The man was young, broad shouldered with spiked bleach-blond hair and a tan that looked as though he'd acquired it on a tanning bed. He held the girl on his lap, and his hand was under her tank top. She was crying. There was a shot from Elizabeth's gun in the next room and he jumped, saw Schaeffer in the doorway, and tried to pull his hand back and push her off his lap so he could reach his gun where it lay on the pillow.

Schaeffer fired a round into his chest, then one more into his head as he toppled back. The girl ran past him out of the room and toward her brother's room. Schaeffer picked up the man's pistol and walked after her into the other room.

Elizabeth was beside her son's bed, trying to tear at the strips of duct tape that had been used to tie him to the iron rails of the bed. Schaeffer stepped to the man lying on the floor. He had been shot twice in the chest, but there seemed to be some movement. He was breathing. Schaeffer fired a round through his head.

"You killed him! Aren't you supposed to call an ambulance?" the daughter said.

"Quiet," Elizabeth said. "We'll talk later." Elizabeth's hands were shaking so much that she couldn't get the tape off her son's wrists.

Schaeffer said, "Go talk now. I'll do this."

Elizabeth put her arm around Amanda and they went out. Schaeffer opened his pocketknife and cut the tape at the wrists and ankles. The boy sat up and then stood.

"Thanks. When he tied me up, he said it was so I wouldn't do anything stupid when I heard what they were doing to my mother and sister."

"We were all lucky they were overconfident."

The boy left the room, and Schaeffer put his small pistol away and took the one the dead man had in his belt, then found two spare magazines in the man's pocket. As an afterthought, he rolled the body over, took out the man's wallet, looked at the California driver's license, then put it back.

He walked out into the hallway and found the three standing on the hardwood floor, their arms around one another, rocking back and forth. The mother was the shortest of the three, even shorter than the daughter, who still had that sylph look that some girls had even into their late teens, that made them seem to be something thinner and lighter than flesh and bone.

"I'd better get out of here," he said.

Elizabeth let go of her children, took his arm, and walked with him down the stairs. "Nobody's coming yet."

"They don't usually call ahead. I should go."

"Not yet. I want to—"

"Stop. Jesus didn't send me. I'm here because this was the best place to hunt for those guys. And you saved your own kids." He turned to head for the back door.

"Wait, please," she said. "I know exactly what to do. You just have to trust me."

"Why would I do that?"

"Because everything changed tonight. All three of us would be dead by now, instead of the three of them. We're alive; they're not."

"I've got to go."

"On your way out, stop by the man you caught trying to rape me. Do what's necessary. Skin the fingertips, shoot him in the face a few times so they can't use it to identify him. You'd know what to do better than I do, but make sure they can't tell who he is by looking. Afterward, leave the gun here. If you need another one, take his."

He studied her for a moment.

"Go ahead. I swear you won't be sorry."